Dr O’Connell has been invited to the board of associate editors for Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE). GBE is an Oxford University Press journal owned by the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, and is in the top ten evolutionary biology journals internationally and has an impact factor of 4.2. “I feel honoured to have been…

More support for Atlantogenata. This week an international collaborative effort has tackled a major challenge in phylogenetics – the interrelationships amongst placental mammals. The paper has just been published in Genome Biology and Evolution (please click here to see the paper). In work led by Dr James Tarver and Dr Davide Pisani (with contributions from…

ow are mammals related to one another ? This question has puzzled biologists for decades. In our most recent publication we describe how, using sequence data and sophisticated phylogenetic models, we have resolved this issue. Our analysis shows that the root of the placental mammal phylogeny is the common ancestor of the xenarthra (e.g. armadillo)…